Making climate change policy: the view from inside
- When?
- Monday 11 October 2010, 13:00 to 14:00
- Where?
- 45a/b AZ 04
- Open to:
- Public, Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Michael Jacobs, Visiting Senior Fellow, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE, and former Special Adviser to Gordon Brown
How do governments actually make policy in a complex area such as climate change? Why do they take the decisions they do? And why do they not take other decisions they are lobbied to do?
Drawing on six years spent as a special adviser at the Treasury and 10 Downing St, Michael Jacobs will offer some reflections on the interplay between the political motivations of ministers, the workings of the civil service and external forces. He will analyse the factors in particular which led to the substantial shift in the radicalism of the Labour government's energy and climate change policy after 2006-7, with the passage of the Climate Change Bill, and far-reaching decisions on emissions targets, renewables, nuclear power, new coal fired power stations, Heathrow and industrial policy. Examining the various pressures faced by government - industrial lobbies and NGO campaigns, media attention and party political opposition, European and international negotiations - he will offer some thoughts on how radical policy change occurs, and how it can be stimulated in the future.
