Combating Climate Change through Network Governance in Singapore’s and Australia’s Air, Land and Water Sectors from 2000 to 2019

Abstract

Reversing the detrimental effects of climate change requires governments worldwide to collaborate with academia and industry to pursue more environmentally friendly socio-economic national policies. Towards these ends, Singapore and Australia provide useful but currently lacking insights. This warrants case-study-driven interrogations into the government/industry/academia-oriented success and risk factors respectively informing their well-performing climate change policies and under-performing climate change policies in the air, land and water sectors from 2000 to 2019 (n = 8). By employing the Triple Helix Theory to analyse the policies, the notable success factors found are government-industry organizational belief in the long-term commercial potential of scientific climate change potential; government-industry-academia recognition of collective intellectual and technological collaboration as necessary; government-industry-academia commitment to methodically pre-empt and mitigate potential conflicts. In contrast, the notable risk factors involve inadequate/un-sustained organizational will by governments to pursue long-term environmentally friendly economic development; government-industry-academia managerial oversight in climate change resource allocation. Finally, implications for future climate change research and policy are discussed.