Climate Change Mitigation and Poverty Reduction (CliMiP) – Trade-Offs or Win-Win Situations?

Does the implementation of climate change mitigation policies in developing countries always involve a trade-off between economic development, poverty reduction, and climate protection, or is there space for "win-win policies"? This question is relevant for today’s fast-growing middle-income economies, which are already or will soon become very significant contributors to global warming. The project will analyse these economies from three different angles: a comparative politics perspective on domestic climate governance and mitigation policy options, an economics perspective on the poverty and distributional impact of mitigation policies, and an international relations perspective on the global discourse surrounding mitigation and economic development. The project staff will cooperate closely with domestic partner institutions in South Africa, Mexico, Thailand and Indonesia, the four case study countries.

Despite the increasing role of today’s developing world in GHG emissions, "climate and development" research to date has largely focused on developing countries’ vulnerability and adaptation to climate change, and on climate-related transfers in these countries, such as those of the Joint Implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Meanwhile, the critical issue of mitigation in developing countries becomes a hotly debated issue in climate negotiations. This focus on mitigation requires a shift in the analytical perspective. While the technological and natural science perspectives that tend to dominate the climate change discourse (with a focus on adaptation) are clearly important, a social science perspective is warranted as well. This is particularly true because of the latter’s usefulness in analysing the possible trade-offs between mitigation and socio-economic development.

The project adopts a multidisciplinary social science approach with a comparative and global perspective. While they will remain firmly theoretically and methodologically grounded in their respective disciplines, the three study areas – (1) domestic climate governance, (2) poverty and distributional impacts of mitigation policies, (3) global perspective and the mitigation-development discourse – will interact continuously. The investigation of domestic climate governance will rely mainly on qualitative methods. These will include interviews with policy-makers, experts and practitioners to investigate their motivations and the driving and constraining forces behind their actions in climate change mitigation policy processes. We then plan to assess the poverty and distributional impacts of mitigation policies (possibly including most NAMAs) in the three case study countries using incidence-focused general equilibrium models, simulation models based on micro-data, and a combination of these two modelling approaches. As mitigation policies in the case study countries are rare and recent, the limited availability of data means that the analyses will typically be ex-ante modelling exercises. In a final step, shaped by the lens of international relations, a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis will allow us to identify the "Frames" or "templates" according to which the problem of developing country mitigation and related themes are presented. This analysis will also demonstrate what types of solutions different actors or actor groups offer for these issues.