Climate and Environment

Create and maintain processes to support public participation in climate change-related policy-making, including for policies related to energy transition issues. Increasingly, evidence shows that deliberative processes work best when they have a formal interface with democratic institutions like parliaments, such as by making recommendations for laws or strategies. For more details, People Powered has published guidance on citizens’ climate assemblies.

• The benefits of deliberative planning and consensus-building methods are covered in more depth in the “Mainstreaming Participation” chapter of this guide.
• OGP members such as France, the United Kingdom, and Scotland have all carried out citizens’ climate assemblies with varying degrees of success in affecting climate policy. Colombia has also engaged in dialogues around its energy transition, and South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission conducts extensive public engagement to inform policy development, including for the Just Transition Framework, the country’s updated Nationally Determined Contributions, and energy sector planning.

Managing the energy transition will require policy coherence across multiple ministries and agencies, such as mining, agriculture, extractives, and infrastructure. Specifically, governments should prioritize the publication of lifecycle data (and models) for greenhouse gas contributions of major sectors, as well as national and sectoral planning documents, to allow public scrutiny and deliberation. Guidance on the transparent and collaborative production of such documents is available for local governments, ASEAN members, EU members, and the renewables sector.

• The United States has emphasized the importance of budgeting and financial planning measures to support a just energy transition. The country’s Council on Environmental Quality also developed a screening tool to identify populations in need of assistance that are disproportionately impacted by pollution, climate change, and other issues.
• Colombia is in the process of aligning its National Energy Plan and development plan with its climate goals.

Publish fossil fuel subsidies data, particularly related to taxes and revenue, to improve the public’s ability to scrutinize the economic and environmental impact of government support for fossil fuel industries. Such data should include amounts broken down by subsidies to producers and consumers. This includes any other expenditures outside of the public budgeting process for state-owned extractive industries. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) provides an international standard for such disclosures.

• Fossil fuel subsidies have numerous costs. Governments lose possible revenue from other, cleaner forms of development—especially when dependence on fossil fuels becomes too ingrained in the economy, infrastructure, and culture of a country. As a result, subsidies prevent consumers from realizing the true cost of fossil fuels, including their role in worsening the impact of climate change, such as negative health and environmental outcomes.
• Nigeria has made strides in reforming its fossil fuel subsidies as part of its energy transition plans.

Follow implementation guidance related to open, sustainable public procurement practices in infrastructure development to ensure open government principles are applied to the energy transition. Governments should consider adding criteria to account for environmental and public health factors as part of such rule-making. The United States, for example, plans to analyze proposals for new liquified natural gas export terminals with such factors in mind.

Through financial regulatory bodies, require private sector companies and financial institutions to publish information on their investments in fossil fuels. Though these actors publish their greenhouse gas accounting information, these disclosures do not include investment information. The lack of public disclosure has environmental consequences and exposes investors and other actors to reputational and regulatory risk.

• Investments in fossil fuels fall under “Scope 3” disclosures, which include emissions from upstream operations in a company’s supply chain and from downstream activities by the company’s customers and end-use consumers.

Publish power purchase agreements in an accessible, standardized format to ensure public scrutiny over these contracts.

Consider requiring the signing of CBAs as part of the approval process for infrastructure and other development projects. At a minimum, CBAs should be public and participatory in their formulation, and such agreements should involve oversight by local democratic institutions and historically vulnerable communities.

• Columbia University’s Sabin Center maintains an open database of this evolving field of practice.

Streamline the permits process to approve clean energy infrastructure projects and pivot away from fossil fuels. Currently, permit regulations in many countries favor existing infrastructure over new infrastructure, which means that it is easier to keep or expand fossil fuel energy generation over newer, cleaner methods such as solar, wind, hydrogen, and nuclear power. Streamlining clean infrastructure approvals also requires public participation to ensure public buy-in for these major projects. Creating accountability mechanisms as part of the permit process would allow governments to course-correct if infrastructure projects do not go as planned.

• OGP members such as Spain have been experimenting with fast-tracking and converting existing rights of way and permits to cleaner energy sources, in line with similar progress throughout the European Union. Other major polluting countries have not been as quick to reform policy processes to favor cleaner energy production and transmission, leaving this a ripe area for action.
• OGP members have also explored the potential for upstream public participation in the permit process through Strategic Environmental Assessments (such as in Canada) or citizens’ juries (such as in the United Kingdom). Permit processes, including environmental impact assessments, have been successful for environmental protection (especially at the local level) and are one of the prime ways that people give inputs into government-sponsored projects. However, OGP members will need to do more to learn how to protect participation while accelerating the development of less harmful energy infrastructure.

Outdated energy grids are increasingly one of the main limiting factors in the rollout of renewable energy. Renewable energy generation tends to be more dispersed and has different grid requirements than fossil fuel systems. Also, there is often a mismatch between where supply and demand are concentrated. Because of the holistic need to update the whole system, countries may benefit from early strategic involvement with multiple sectors and levels of government, rather than project-by-project planning.

Publish resource contracts and licenses for the exploration and exploitation of critical minerals, including in licensing and permit processes. When contracts are negotiated in secret, the risk of agreeing to bad terms or conflicts of interest increases. The public, investors, and governments need to be able to see how much each critical mineral project costs and produces, as well as who benefits from the profits. Standards for contract transparency in this area have been developed by the International Consortium on Mining and Minerals and EITI.

Create or strengthen transparency and accountability mechanisms in supply chains and energy investment practices to address issues such as forced labor, labor protections, environmental damage, and bribery. It is also important to ensure that conflict resolution and law enforcement processes are fast, fair, and transparent.

• The United States has long been a site of claims under the Alien Torts Act and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which have been used to address forced labor and bribery in supply chains. Transparency requirements are also in place for “conflict minerals” as defined in the country’s 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. In addition, new EU legislation also creates liabilities along the supply chain, as well as pathways for remedy and redress for those individuals harmed by a supplier. As a successful example of how an accountability mechanism could work, a recent suit held a British company liable for upstream supply chain abuses in Zambia.