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5 NOVEMBER 2021 • VOL 374 ISSUE 6568 691policy integration” ( 11 ), and “mainstream-
ing” of climate policy into related policy
arenas, as well as the supportive tasks of
monitoring and assessing progress. Because
each domain also includes established and
competing interests, this is not only a tech-
nical challenge but also a political one.
States have developed four broad re-
sponses to the coordination challenge. The
default option is to layer climate coordina-
tion responsibilities onto existing environ-
mental ministries, but this approach has
proved to be relatively ineffective. For ex-
ample, in India, the environment ministry
was too weak to direct other, more powerful
ministries. In Germany, sectoral governance
structures, such as long-standing corporatist
approaches in the transport sector, proved
more enduring than attempts at coordina-
tion by the environment department, albeit
without a formal mandate. An important ex-
ception is the United States, where the deep
capacity of the Environmental Protection
Agency was deployed with positive effect
once it was explicitly mandated to do so.Second, countries have reorganized their
bureaucracies to allocate climate change
responsibilities. In the UK, bureaucratic re-
organization brought environment together
with industrial strategy in a new department.
Consistent with its view of climate change as
a developmental challenge, China embedded
climate coordination in its powerful National
Development and Reform Commission from
2007 to 2018, with formal authority to steer
line ministries, before shifting responsibility
to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.
Third, many countries have developed
new interministerial coordination commit-
tees, with mixed success. They have had lim-
ited effect in Brazil on the politically heavy-
weight sectors of forests and agriculture and
in South Africa on electricity and mining.
In India, coordination was successful when
endowed with the authority of the prime
minister’s office through a special envoy,
who was able to drive ministerial coopera-
tion. However, these coordination capacities
have often proved insufficiently durable. The
Indian envoy did not endure interministerialpolitics. In the United States or Australia, ex-
ecutive branch coordination structures have
emerged and vanished with electoral out-
comes. Coordination in China is more stable
because it draws on the institutional device
of National Leading Groups, which are used
for a range of cross-ministerial coordination.
A fourth approach is creating climate laws,
subsuming the coordination challenge within
a framework of target setting and compli-
ance, as in the UK, Germany, and briefly,
Australia. Yet coordination capacity remains
weak even within these frameworks. The UK
Climate Change Act lacks an explicit mecha-
nism to coordinate across sectors, leading to
uneven performance—aggressive mitigation
in electricity but limited in transport, for ex-
ample. In Australia, coordination was implic-
itly assumed to occur through the setting of a
carbon price, but the Climate Change Act was
short-lived. More long-lasting were special-
ized law-backed agencies to promote renew-
able energy, which were politically resilient
perhaps because they distributed benefits
rather than allocating costs.Building consensus
Institutions are needed to mediate low-
and high-carbon interests and ideally build
consensus toward low-carbon futures. That
climate mitigation efforts may create los-
ers now and winners later complicates po-
litical mediation ( 12 ). Conventional interest
groups, such as labor and capital, may not
line up neatly on one or another side of poli-
cies ( 5 ). In this complex political landscape,
institutions can provide credible informa-
tion and analysis that shifts politics, creates
new narratives, and creates credible spaces
for bargaining among interests.
The UK Climate Change Committee illus-
trates how providing credible information
can help build consensus around mitigation;
the Committee’s analysis is invoked when
setting carbon budgets, serving as a ratchet
to prevent backsliding. Australia has estab-
lished a Climate Change Authority with a
mandate to provide independent informa-
tion, but a similarly salutary effect on policy-
making has not been documented, although
whether this is due to the effectiveness of the
institution or the intractability of Australian
climate politics is unclear.
Deliberative bodies can help change cli-
mate narratives, opening new political op-
portunities and configurations. The Brazilian
Climate Change Forum has, since 2000, for-
mulated and injected proposals into pub-
lic discourse, including a net zero target.
However, its ability to influence climate-
friendly political administrations is greater
than its ability to buffer more climate-skep-
tical administrations. In South Africa, the
National Economic Development and LabourA worker cleans solar cells in a housing complex in Kolkata, India. A climate action plan in India led to the
National Solar Mission, providing a political arena for solar energy interests.