“Why Climate Action Gets Stuck and What to do About it” begins with a vexing puzzle. There is a troubling and recurring pattern in responses to climate change where climate action (at many levels—cities, provinces, federal, global) gets started, but tends to run into obstacles and stalls or even backtracks. Drawing on multiple examples from a five-year research project, I explain why that happens and explore the possibilities for getting unstuck and catalyzing the kind of transformative change we need to head off and navigate the climate emergency.
Matthew Hoffmann is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. He is also Co-Director of the Environmental Governance Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs. Professor Hoffmann’s research and teaching interests include global governance, climate change politics, and international relations theory. He is the author of Climate Governance at the Crossroads: Experimenting with a Global Response after Kyoto (Oxford University Press 2011) and Ozone Depletion and Climate Change: Constructing a Global Response (SUNY Press 2005). He also is a co-author on a recent collaborative book Transnational Climate Change Governance (Cambridge University Press 2014). His current collaborative research project, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, explores the development of Political Pathways to Decarbonization. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx