Splitting Climate Engineering Governance: How Problem Structure Shapes Institutional Design

This article adds conceptual discipline to a well‐rehearsed but largely intuitive argument within the climate engineering community that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) should be treated separately – ‘split’ rather than ‘lumped’ – in policy discussions. Specifically, we build the first, theoretically derived argument for ‘splitting’. We do this by engaging a set of theoretical insights from the international relations literature, having to do with the relationship between problem structure and institutional design. Centrally, we apply some key elements of problem structure – which allows us to compare policy issues along variables such as geographic scope, costs, and actor number and asymmetries – to the cases of SRM and CDR. By analyzing their problem structures, we demonstrate that SRM and CDR are different in ways that are likely to yield different state preferences for institutional design, and thus policy proposals that split SRM and CDR are more likely to be adopted by states. In short, we construct a theoretical argument for ‘splitting’ SRM and CDR governance in global policy discussions.