INNOVATIONS IN CLIMATE CHANGE LEGISLATION
INNOVATIONS IN CLIMATE CHANGE LEGISLATION: KENYA, UGANDA AND NIGERIA IN FOCUS This article was written by Catherine Higham, Anirudh Sridhar, and Emily Bradeen from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE). The article was produced in collaboration with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) to examine developments in climate legislation in Africa ahead of the 66th Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference in Accra, Ghana. The authors are grateful for the insights and review provided by the following experts from the countries considered in this article: Hon. Christine Kaaya Nakimwero, Member of Uganda’s Parliament and Member of Parliamentary Climate Change Committee; Hon. Samuel Onuigbo, Former Representative of Nigeria’s House of Representative and Chair of Nigeria’s Climate Parliament; Dr Temitope Onifade of Bristol University; Daphne Kamuntu and Bridget Ampurira, Greenwatch Uganda; and Pauline Makutsa, Adaptation Consortium. The article also benefited from reviews by Olivia Rumble of Climate Legal and Tiffanie Chan of the Grantham Research Institute.
Introduction Around the world, over 1,000 laws related to climate change have been passed by Legislatures in at least 170 countries. These laws are captured in the Climate Change Laws of the World Database1 maintained by the Grantham Research Institute at the LSE. The database reveals a variety of legal designs that respond to the common threat of climate change, while accounting for context specific challenges and different traditions of governance. Comparative analyses of these climate laws (Sridhar et al 2022; Scotford and Minas 2018) enable knowledge and exchange between actors involved in climate law-making.2 The global body of climate laws is hugely varied, but past research has identified two broad categories: 1. Overarching framework laws: These laws offer “a unifying basis for climate change policy, addressing multiple aspects or areas of mitigation or adaptation (or both) in a holistic and overarching manner”. (Sridhar et al, 2022; See also Townshend et al, 2011; Clare et al, 2017; Fankhauser et al, 2014).3 Such laws typically set the agenda for a country's climate policy response, often include provisions establishing institutions and processes to enable government action on climate change, and frequently include specific policy instruments such as carbon pricing schemes and fossil fuel phaseouts. Such laws can be valuable both for their narrative signalling and for their ability to make “action on climate change more predictable, more structured and more evidence-based” (Averchenkova et al, 2020). Around the world, there are now close to 60 such laws from at least 53 countries, 15 of which are in the Commonwealth. 2. Sectoral laws: These laws aim to address climate issues in a given sector of the economy such as industry, energy, transport or finance (Sridhar et al, 2022). Many such laws are introduced through amendments to pre-existing legislation. Examples include environmental impact assessment laws that are updated to include provisions on considering the implications of a proposed project on climate change, (see: Impact Assessment Act (S.C. 2019, c. 28, s. 1)), energy laws upgraded to target climate mitigation in energy conservation policies (see: Energy Conservation Act 2022 Amendment), and finance laws amended to include climate change risks and opportunities (see: Financial Sector (Climaterelated Disclosures and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2021). Both types of legislation will be needed to address climate issues. However, in many cases, the introduction of a framework
310 | The Parliamentarian | 2023: Issue Four | 100 years of publishing
law will help facilitate the effective development of sectoral laws, particularly where a system-wide approach is needed to ensure that complementarities and tradeoffs are well understood. With that in mind, this article provides an overview of some of the key functions of framework laws before taking a closer look at laws from the Commonwealth countries of Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria. We have elected to focus on these case studies for two reasons. Firstly, because these laws are in general less widely discussed in academic and policy literature. Secondly, because each of these three countries is highly vulnerable to climate change but has made a relatively small per capita contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions, and as a result, they offer examples of framework laws where climate change adaptation approaches have been “especially prioritized” or given similar weight to mitigation (Rumble, 2019), which is often the primary priority in more well-studied laws from the Global North. What are governance functions of framework laws? Climate change generates a set of governance challenges that are unlike other environmental problems in scale and scope. Sources across the economy contribute to the problem, the pervasive nature of its impacts are felt throughout society, and a wide range of actors must be recruited to manage those impacts. In order to tackle such a complex problem, a framework law is often required to facilitate consensus building around strategies and targets (among potential winners and losers), mainstream climate-conscious decision making into the regular functioning of line Ministries, and coordinate national and subnational governments in transformational restructurings. By creating institutional arrangements requiring different actors to engage with climate policy, framework laws facilitate selforganisation across different sectors. Despite the consistency of these governance problems across countries, they can only be tackled by a careful study of how they manifest in a particular political and economic context. For instance, the degree of autonomy that subnational governments enjoy in a country will bear significantly on its style of climate federalism; and the size and nature of the economy will determine the effort required to restructure the economy to a low carbon one. Considering the ‘governance functions’ of framework laws is a way to reconcile the common governance problems posed by climate change and the specific ways in which those problems should be approached in given contexts. The paper that introduced this concept defines them as ‘the necessary and desirable roles
