Insights About Climate, Energy and the Future Of Public Policy Education [Podcast]

Conversation Highlights

Responses have been edited for clarity.

On best practices in innovation

What I've learned about innovation is whether you're trying to get an individual or a household or a firm to innovate, you really have to think about both the moral and the financial implications and incentives to innovate and design your policy intervention in a way that actually changes behavior and not just rewards people for doing good already if they've already undertaken an act. 

On how public policy can spur innovation

Image

In many cases, you start off in a policy area where you want to push an innovation that has a public benefit, like energy efficiency or renewables that have reduced greenhouse gas emissions. What you're trying to do is get a market started in that technology space. 

Firms will drive down the cost of energy efficient technologies. They'll drive down the cost of electric vehicles. They'll extend the range of electric vehicles because all of that's in the incentive structure of firms who want to sell products. And so, in the public sector, your job is really to kind of catalyze early private sector commitments to these goals by showing that there can be demand for these kinds of new technologies and products. 

What that means for public policy is - there is a moment when you need to start reducing that subsidy and letting the market take over because as it progresses, people will start purchasing electric vehicles because they make financial sense, not because they reduce greenhouse gas emissions, for example. 

And so, it's a dynamic policy setting where you really have to understand your end user, design incentives for them and then realize that's just the beginning of the process. Your measure of success is being able to phase out those incentives over time.

On changes to how public policy schools should train future leaders

I think policy schools could add to the repertoire a series of civic and political engagement skills that we haven't taught.

There's more that we can do. There's more that we should do. Part of this is focusing on developing our students with a set of leadership skills and civic skills so that they can more easily occupy a variety of civic roles. So, for example, we should be training them how to run for office. We should be offering executive education training to newly elected officials and newly appointed officials and election workers.

We should be teaching students how to facilitate civil discourse and the development of new policies in legislative environments by training them to not only take a first step of listening to someone they might disagree with, but listen to them, and then begin to think strategically: “What can we agree on that's good for society and that would move us forward and move us towards a coalition where a majority of us can support something that addresses a problem that we've all faced and that we'd all benefit from?”

• Read the full episode transcript.