Confronted with the large gap between what science tells us about the dangers of climate change and the unwillingness of some elected officials to implement policies to address the problem, a group of University of California-Berkeley scholars is outlining some new strategies for moving climate policy forward.

The primary goal of their work is to build pro-climate coalitions that will establish strong support for meaningful policy change. Their paper, “Winning Coalitions for Climate Change,” calls for a number of policy strategies that could build industrial support for carbon regulations.

The Berkeley team first suggests implementing a suite of policies that target green industries. This includes targeted subsidies, tax rebates, and standards that will directly benefit the low-carbon energy industries and the financial advisors that have the potential to build support for carbon regulations. Once linked in to these incentives, a coalition of these same green industry actors would be well positioned to push for greater and more in-depth climate change policy. (In other words: as they say in Washington, D.C., money talks and politicians walk).

The second set of actions proposed involves “[driving] initial shifts in investment and revenues that can realign interests in industries.” Though the authors acknowledge that a carbon tax or cap-and-trade regime could be the “most efficient” solution to climate change, they also suggest that it’s an “ineffective” pathway for building coalitions and realigning interests. (Here, they’re borrowing a page from John Kingdon’s classic public policy book, “Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies,” which points to the value of positive feedback in the policy-making process).

To better understand how a shift in investments and interests can occur, the Berkeley team looked at two decades of policy that promotes positive feedback and builds coalitions, examining measures such as renewable portfolio standards (RPS) and Feed-in Tariffs (FITs) around the world. They found that two-thirds of the 54 countries and subnational entities that adopted a carbon-pricing scheme by 2013 had first implemented an RPS or FITs policy. What this finding suggests is that RPS and FITs policy can be critical in “sequencing” policy – i.e., stronger policies down the road (the kind that punish industrial polluters) often began with a green industrial coalition making strides against a status quo energy sector.

The authors also discuss “carbon-lock”, the term used to describe how industrial economies become locked into fossil fuels through a combination of infrastructures, institutions, networks, and actors who benefit from the energy status quo. To overcome carbon-lock, the paper suggests strengthening the green industrial sector by implementing the positive feedback strategy – or the strategic sequencing of policies – mentioned above. The authors advise: “Strategic sequencing requires adaptive policy-design – focused on knowledge exchange, discipline, and accountability – to prevent lock-in of the technical-institutional path...”

Though it may be controversial in policy circles, the authors argue that strategic sequencing with policy measures such as RPS and FITs will actually speed up the progress toward more aggressive carbon emission cuts. While the Berkeley team is taking a global view, their recommendations may in fact resonate domestically: public policy in the United States has a long history of incrementalism – smaller more modest policy steps over big, bold actions.

Going forward, the paper suggests looking for local variations in policy interventions, studying how to avoid dead-ends in policy, and increasing policy flexibility. The authors also call for more studies on how “brown”, high-carbon industries adapt their practices in opposition to policies that encourage green growth.