The Politics of Methane Policy
There has been an enormous amount of policy innovation and development around methane over the last 10 years.
The Global Methane Pledge, launched at COP26 in 2021, sets a target of a 30% reduction in global methane emissions by 2030. And this has been accompanied by the development of scores of national and regional methane regulations, plus a sophisticated international architecture to support them.
But there has, till now, been very little research on the politics of all this methane policy development.
Hence the aim of our research on this theme is to explore how methane policies and regulations are shaped by political dynamics. We ask:
- How have the policy developments of the last decade been shaped by political interests, institutions, structures and/or leadership?
- How have such political factors intersected with technological, economic, monitoring and other changes to catalyse and shape methane policies?
- How do political factors structure the content – the preferences and priorities, oversights and silences, strengths and weaknesses – of specific methane policies and regulations?
- How are political factors – corporate and intergovernmental lobbying, regulatory capacities, funding availability, backlash politics and more – affecting patterns of policy implementation, policy stability and regulatory retreat?
- How does the politics of methane policy vary across sites, sectors and scales?
- In what ways does the politics of methane policy differ from that associated with CO2?
- To what extent does the politics of methane policy explain why progress towards limiting methane emissions has been so slow? and
- How, in light of the above, may methane policies and regulations be strengthened and improved?
Continue reading about the politics of implementation here >