Knowledge for Policy

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is one of the flexible mechanisms designed by the Kyoto Protocol as a win-win policy tool, by which developed countries are able to attain global greenhouse gases mitigation through cost-effective measures and developing countries can take advantage of technology and capital transfer to promote sustainable development practices. The aim of this paper is to analyse and describe Italy's position and behaviour in the CDM market in terms of its geographical and sectoral interventions. Italian projects reflect the global trend of choosing China and India as the privileged host countries. In particular, China represents the largest market for fugitive emissions abatement projects, offering vast and relatively inexpensive opportunities to obtain carbon credits. Italy is one among the leading countries in terms of the percentage of credits obtained from CDM projects, specifically because most of its CDM certificates originate from the reduction of fugitive HFC-23 (trifluromethane) emissions, which are a by-product of the production of HCFC-22, with a global warming potential 11,700 times larger than carbon dioxide (CO2). If on the one hand Italy's behaviour with respect to CDM projects is a virtuous example of the potential of CDM projects to generate cost-effective reductions of GHGs, on the other hand the possibility of creating carbon credits from the destruction of HFC-23 does not appear as a sustainable option, due to their perverse effects on the Montreal Protocol's objectives.

China and India represent two exemplary cases to address the contentious compromise between two needs: on the one side that of economic development, and on the other side that of coping with climate change concerns. Wind energy is the focus of this paper, where the aim is to investigate how the two countries have supported this new technology to complement their efforts for securing energy needs. The comparative analysis is built upon a deep investigation of the institutional and market structure of the wind market in China and India in light of their historical evolution. Despite one relevant similarity that national wind energy markets have been fundamentally domestic-driven, important differences emerge as to the relation between the public and private involvement.

The parsing of the WTO EC-Biotech is intended to raise substantive issues on the interface between science and law to the extent that the former is brought as legal evidence before courts. The paper contends that the Panel maintains a form of substantial and procedural transitivity between the ability to perform risk assessment and the sufficiency of scientific evidence to legitimate measures of protection, by that preventing States from legitimately undertaking precautionary measures in the absence of scientific evidence. This said, the paper will propose a new way to intend and demonstrate scientific uncertainty in WTO trade disputes.

The aim of this paper is to review the basic literature on scientific uncertainty in its statistical paradigm in order to provide enlightenment on one pivotal facet of the precautionary principle, i.e. the allocation of the burden of proof to demonstrate that an activity is not harmful to the environment. The purpose is not to explain a new theory of statistical inference, but to show how regulatory policymaking that is properly informed by scientific expertise and designed to avoid one type of error, may actually make other errors more likely and thus expose the public to danger. This problem is explained in terms of the conceptual as well as operational conflicts that arise when knowledge about statistical-inferential methods is applied to policymaking. The paper argues that this issue can be resolved by first reconsidering the burden of proof as a burden of uncertainty.

This paper intends to analyse whether any linkage exists between the way China and India have reached a prominent position in the global market for wind energy and their striking dominance on the share of projects for wind power financed under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). By questing the type of incentive pushing Annex I countries on the one hand, and China and India on the other to enter into this specific market transaction in the wind sector, we will demonstrate that the case of wind energy is peculiar under a CDM-based logic. Rather than driving the demand of Annex I countries for CERs, wind-related projects under the CDM show an important push-based supply effect from the hosting countries (i.e. the supplier of CERs). This effect is related not only to the additional financing channelled through the CDM, but also to a sensitive “unlocking effect” triggered by the CDM on the Indian and Chinese energy sectors that would have otherwise become plastered into their institutional rigidities.

This Article aims to demonstrate that the WTO jurisprudence on science-related trade disputes has become imbued with a specific vision of science that has prevented any possible application of the precautionary principle. This situation is due both to the WTO’s specific dispute settlement procedures and to the substantive nature of precautionary measures. Indeed, such measures’ foundation on “insufficient scientific evidence” dramatically undermines the probative value of science in WTO adjudication and creates a seeming contradiction: The system requires defendants to provide legal evidence of the absence of sufficient scientific evidence. The reasoning of the Panel on the EC–Biotech case was riddled with this apparent paradox. For the first time, the US–Continued Suspension case has opened a gateway to address this fundamental issue.

The premises of this paper rely on associating policy inertia toward action on climate change with the inadequacy of the classical ‘liability culture’ of evidence-based policy-making to deal with this global environmental challenge. To provide support to this hypothesis, the following discussion analyses the technical properties and the current policy use of Integrated Assessment Modelling (IAM) of economic-climate interactions. The paper contends that IAM is still not clarified enough as far as its potential for information-production in the framework of policy making processes is concerned, and that this fact
is symptomatic of the current inability of societies to undertake the challenge of sustainability. The paper explains the reasons for this disconnect and proposes solutions in the form of a renovated framework of deliberative policy-making.

This Article aims to demonstrate that the WTO jurisprudence on science-related trade disputes has become imbued with a specific vision of science that has prevented any possible application of the precautionary principle. This situation is due both to the WTO’s specific dispute settlement procedures and to the substantive nature of precautionary measures. Indeed, such measures’ foundation on “insufficient scientific evidence” dramatically undermines the probative value of science in WTO adjudication and creates a seeming contradiction: The system requires defendants to provide legal evidence of the absence of sufficient scientific evidence. The reasoning of the Panel on the EC–Biotech case was riddled with this apparent paradox. For the first time, the US–Continued Suspension case has opened a gateway to address this fundamental issue.

"Environmental governance is a privileged field of experiments for new modes of social interactions and sustainable development is recurrently charged as the new framework for a paradigm shift. Shift from which paradigm?
From market-based mechanisms adjusting incentives to act to ethical concerns advocating duties to act, the demand for ever more sophisticated information was meant to trigger change of direction in our ways of living in the name of self-evident necessity. After all, production of evidence serves many purposes: it bolsters policy legitimation, provides elements that help coordinate different actors, offers grounds for justification in case of litigation and guarantees multiple accountability. Reliance on evidence has shaped a dominant cooperative scheme in which rational decision-making has coincided with the capacity to justify policy action under the same logic of legal liability: creating symmetry between the past and the present, namely by restoring a past situation. As much as compensation allows this to the purpose of making individuals indifferent between two states, the production of evidence allows policymakers to escape judgment and responsibility for their decisions.
The paper aims to rehabilitate the concept of responsibility by abandoning the paradigm of ex-post liability to the benefit of one of ex-ante positioning. The first step would be to restore the link between legitimacy and responsibility in policymaking beyond the dominant connection between legitimacy and competency. A new rationality for decision-making would then follow, according to which policy actions should be judged for their capacity to deliberate about ends. This paper contends that current decision tools, such as Integrated Assessment Modelling for climate change policies (IAM), are already adapted to bring forward this challenge, and along with it, a paradigm shift. The discussion of the properties of IAM provides the theoretical framework for addressing such renovation, along with the challenges for democratic functioning."

There is a recurring idea that cost benefit analysis (CBA) helps instil rationality in policymaking, especially by informing the decision-making process so that it is both neutral (i.e. non-biased to any particular group), and evidence-based (i.e. transparent and accountable to interested parties). While rational regulation should certainly be encouraged and there is no doubt that CBA is able to play a role, this paper challenges the second part of the hypothesis above, specifically questioning whether CBA can ever be considered as neutral or evidence-based. The divorce between rationality on one hand and neutrality and evidence on the other will be made apparent through a discussion of the properties of Integrated Assessment Modelling (IAM), which is used to build up climate change scenarios, to which CBA is a central tenet. IAM aims to structure complex phenomena (such as the interaction between economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions) by providing insight into how the processes under investigation may unfold, starting from specific assumptions on certain parameters, such as the long-debated discount rate for example. A peculiarity of IAM is that the scientific character, or the rationality, of its usage lies in the way those assumptions are chosen, rather than in the mere ability to produce evidence in a cause-and-effect style. As explained herein, rational selection is not based solely on the criteria of plausibility and caution that is typical in science, but also depends on the decision to pursue (or reject) a certain policy trajectory according to revealed policy preferences, as the example of the discount rate certainly illustrates. In this sense, rather than neutralizing policy biases, the selection of initial assumptions discloses them in the form of an attitude to the drawing up of regulations, where CBA can be used to licence policy changes in two different ways: either conservatively, by confirming or not the status quo depending on whether a deviation from it brings reasonable improvements, or more progressively, by continuously subjecting the pursuit of certain policy trajectories to the test of acceptability. It is here contended that IAM is specifically intended to contribute to the second test.

Through the construction of future scenarios that cannot deliver in terms of predictive capacity, Integrated Assessment Modeling (IAM) is still not clarified enough for its contribution to sustainable development. This paper explains the reasons for this disconnect in terms of the inability to deliberate about future ‘beyond evidence’, that is, beyond a justificatory logic in which the capacity to judge and validate commitments is linked to the capacity to produce evidence, hence anticipated justification, of their outcomes. This inability will be traced in terms of the epistemology of IAM relying on a specific combination between welfare economics based on the ethics of optimization and a positivistic vision of science. Once established the limits of this combination, the epistemology of IAM will be used to propose a new mode of decision-making based on a methodology of “reverse engineering” in which scenarios will serve promoting the comparison between fictions of the future in order to allow judging on the plausibility and legitimacy of present commitments to these same fictions.

L’exercice de la modélisation intégrée et de la construction de scénarios met en lumière les limites de l’optimisation économique quant à l’appréhension des choix de long terme tels que la réduction des émission de gaz à effet de serre face au réchauffement climatique. Ces limites consistent en l’annulation de la différence analytique entre individu et société d’une part, et entre présent et futur de l’autre. Le résultat en est que la modélisation informe un type de rationalité difficile à utiliser, dans le sens à la fois scientifique et politique.
Si l’écologie politique questionne notre mode de vie en tant que redéfinition des modes de ralliement ou de coordination entre individus face à la capacité limitée de la Planète à les soutenir, il est important de comprendre comment faire en sorte que les individus puissent se coordonner d'une part sur la base d’instances profondément incertaines qui rendent problématique l’identification de repères partagés pour juger, contester et délibérer de manière collective; et de l'autre en vue d’un futur qui n’existe pas et dont, cependant, on devrait se préoccuper. L’optimisation économique, notamment, annule cette contradiction importante de savoir se soucier d'un avenir que nous ne connaissons pas à travers l’utilisation du taux d’actualisation et le traitement indirecte de l’incertitude, c’est via le recours inévitable aux contre-factuels.
Enfin, le caractère profondément interdisciplinaire de la modélisation climatique combinant les disciplines pertinentes au comportement du système naturel et du système socio-économique fait écho au type de défi sur l’interdisciplinarité que l’écologie politique pose sur deux plans : celui de la connexion entre les disciplines scientifiques et celui de la connexion entre les sciences et la politique, cette dernière entendue comme participation.
L’appréhension de l’incertitude scientifique est le point de départ de ce défi, tant dans la modélisation que dans l’écologie politique.

À travers la construction de scénarios futurs dénoués de capacité prédictive, les modèles d’évaluation intégrée (MEI) demeurent un outil scientifique encore mal appréhendé pour informer les choix politiques. Ce papier explique la raison de cette déconnection en termes d’incapacité à délibérer du futur. Celle-ci correspond à une logique politique très conservative souvent étayée sur une optimisation économique traitant l’incertitude de manière indirecte et sur une vision positiviste des sciences et de la preuve. La perte de symétrie entre passé et futur que les MEI provoquent car basés sur des sciences complexes, « historiques », jamais prévisibles mais toujours « rétrovisibles », implique la difficulté à projeter le présent dans le futur de manière confortable – voire répétitive – et rassurante – voire contrôlable. La prise de décision serait ainsi dénouée d’un terme comparatif. Les apports épistémologiques des MEI permettent de le reformuler. A travers une méthodologie de reverse engineering, les scénarios seraient utilisés non pas pour juger de la probabilité d’évolutions futures, mais pour indiquer à quelles possibilités  futures le présent ouvre, et de manière rétrodictive, comprendre les implications de ces scénarios/représentations en termes d’actions présentes à engager, c’est-à-dire en termes d’hypothèses initiales par rapport à l’évolution du système. Les MEI promouvraient ainsi la comparaison entre fictions du futur afin de pouvoir juger de la plausibilité et de la légitimité des engagements présents.

À travers la construction de scénarios futurs dénoués de capacité prédictive, les modèles d’évaluation intégrée (MEI) demeurent un outil scientifique encore mal appréhendé pour informer les choix politiques. Ce papier explique la raison de cette déconnection en termes d’incapacité à délibérer du futur. Celle-ci correspond à une logique politique très conservative souvent étayée sur une optimisation économique traitant l’incertitude de manière indirecte et sur une vision positiviste des sciences et de la preuve. La perte de symétrie entre passé et futur que les MEI provoquent car basés sur des sciences complexes, « historiques », jamais prévisibles mais toujours « rétrovisibles », implique la difficulté à projeter le présent dans le futur de manière confortable – voire répétitive – et rassurante – voire contrôlable. La prise de décision serait ainsi dénouée d’un terme comparatif. Les apports épistémologiques des MEI permettent de le reformuler. A travers une méthodologie de reverse engineering, les scénarios seraient utilisés non pas pour juger de la probabilité d’évolutions futures, mais pour indiquer à quelles possibilités  futures le présent ouvre, et de manière rétrodictive, comprendre les implications de ces scénarios/représentations en termes d’actions présentes à engager, c’est-à-dire en termes d’hypothèses initiales par rapport à l’évolution du système. Les MEI promouvraient ainsi la comparaison entre fictions du futur afin de pouvoir juger de la plausibilité et de la légitimité des engagements présents.

“Sustaining the future” actually means sustaining the present and the consciousness of it. However the impossibility to fix the future into manageable categories of epistemic control – such as in the context of highly uncertain extreme events associated with climate change – seems justifying its depoliticization. Despite massive scientific enterprise, we still fail to feel the urgency of the present moment to prepare for a certain future, one that we would be willing to maintain open to diverse and multiple projections, as each new generation would be free to choose. We argue that the science of modelling and scenario production can actually support the process of re-connection with the present, provided that we seriously reconsider the “performativity” of modelling. Modelling should be performed to generate experience about some future and reveal our positioning with respect to it in each subsequent moment of decision making. Also, modelling should be epistemologically and normatively reconsidered for the challenges it poses to the scientific method per se – i.e. the process of building scientific narratives - and to the role of research into policy – the social process of using these scientific narratives. We will explain how to put such paradigm shift into practice through an innovative use of a discrete time stochastic model based on Markov decision process, where outcomes are partly random and partly under the control of a decision maker. The irreducible uncertainty identified into specific parameters and assumptions will function as the action point of both political commitments and scientific sense making.