Abstract
It is critical to ensure climate and energy policies are just, equitable and beneficial for communities, both to sustain public support for decarbonisation and address multifaceted societal challenges. Our objective in this article is to examine the diverse social outcomes that have resulted from climate policies, in varying contexts worldwide, over the past few decades. We review 203 ex-post climate policy assessments that analyse social outcomes in the literature. We systematically and comprehensively map out this work, identifying articles on carbon, energy and transport taxes, feed-in-tariffs, subsidies, direct procurement policies, large renewable deployment projects, and other regulatory and market-based interventions. We code each article in terms of their studied social outcomes and effects, with a focus on electricity access, energy affordability, community cohesion, employment, distributional and equity issues, livelihoods and poverty, procedural justice, subjective well-being and drudgery. Our analysis finds that climate and energy policies often fall short of delivering positive social outcomes. Nonetheless, across country contexts and policy types there are manifold examples of climate policymaking that does deliver on both social and climate goals. This requires attending to distributive and procedural justice in policy design, and making use of appropriate mechanisms to ensure that policy costs and benefits are fairly shared. We emphasize the need to further advance ex-post policy assessments and learn about what policies work for a just transition.
Highlights
Climate change mitigation policies are urgently needed worldwide to avoid exceeding the Paris Agreement goals of 1.5 ◦C and 2 ◦C warming
We divide the review into major subcategories, such as the different technologies under a feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme, or different types of taxes; within these we focus on clusters of outcome effects and identify deviating cases
Separating out the individual policies and social outcomes within these studies, we find a total of 457 effects, or policy-outcome combinations
Summary
Climate change mitigation policies are urgently needed worldwide to avoid exceeding the Paris Agreement goals of 1.5 ◦C and 2 ◦C warming. Avoiding negative social impacts has become a critical issue: if these policies are perceived as unfair or socially harmful, they no doubt stand a greater chance of being attacked, repealed and revoked. This remains a deep concern in developed and developing contexts alike—including major emitting countries such as the United States, Brazil, India, France, and others—where pre-existing issues such as structural inequality and the emergence of right-wing populism have primed the political landscape against climate policy action (Lockwood 2018, Rodríguez-Pose 2018). Designed policies that exacerbate social problems are a gift to fossil fuel interests, who will actively exploit such opportunities to roll-back regulations and limit their compliance costs
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
