Includes bibliographical references and index.

Can the world stop climate change? The prognosis is bleak. Most efforts to tackle the problem have focused on treaties that require virtually global consensus, yet meaningful consensus has been elusive because deep cuts in emissions are expensive and antagonize well-organized interests. Predictably, diplomacy has swung between gridlock and superficial agreements with little impact. After three decades of sustained negotiations on global warming, emissions have risen by one third. Stopping climate warming requires that they be cut essentially to zero. Sabel and Victor look to offer a case for optimism by proposing a different strategy: to recast climate change as a problem best addressed piecemeal. Rather than seeking a grand, global bargain, they argue that the problem should be broken down into local challenges. They call this concept "experimentalist governance"-massive simultaneous searches for local solutions that are scalable to the global level, with a focus not on marginal incentives for success but on penalties for repeated, egregious failure. The authors show, through a series of cases, how regulators, firms, farms and NGOs, faced with penalty defaults, are learning to solve some of the knottiest environmental problems; they then propose central mechanisms that could help monitor and review progress, establishing which experiments are working and establish new frontiers for experimentation. While the threat of impending catastrophe has understandably made debate about climate policy increasingly shrill and polarized, Sabel and Victor offer here a guide to institutional design that could finally lead to the politically and economically self-sustaining reductions in emissions that thirty years of global diplomacy has not delivered.