Latin American elites favor polycentric governance in climate change agreements

Abstract

Scholars and policy-makers generally assume that climate change mitigation requires global scale governance. However, the international provision of public goods is particularly susceptible to free riders and poor monitoring. Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom argued that a decentralized approach to climate governance might be able to address these issues by fostering trust among members of the civil society and generating the local knowledge necessary to e ectively implement climate policies. Here we run a conjoint experiment with elite members of 10 Latin American countries and ask respondents to evaluate 6,000 possible climate change agreements that vary across six dimensions. We nd that Latin American elites strongly prefer polycentric regimes to centralized ones, and the result is robust across countries and elite types. These ndings not only suggest novel ways to craft democratic climate change mitigation agreements, but also o er new insights on how to integrate interventions at the local and international levels.