Federalism and mitigating climate change: The merits of flexibility, experimentalism, and dissonance

Abstract

Federalism is ostensibly misplaced to mitigate climate change as a global public concern as it is prone to import the inadequate incentive structures existing at the international level into the domestic domain. Drawing from the legal structures and procedures of Swiss federalism, this article attempts to provide a more nuanced assessment of the relationship between laws designed to mitigate climate change and federalism. It seeks to demonstrate that federalism may support effective policies to mitigate climate change, provided that the architecture of domestic climate change law meets certain criteria. These include considerable federal powers, a degree of institutional flexibility, robust formal channels of influence for subnational actors on policy formulation at the federal level, ample room for regulatory experimentalism at the lower layers of federalism, and the ‘right to act’ conferred on the Federation to avoid political impasse among the constituent units.