Solar geoengineering research programs on national agendas: a comparative analysis of Germany, China, Australia, and the United States

Solar geoengineering (SG), or the proposed use of technology to reflect sunlight back to space as a means of partially counteracting climate change, requires systematic research funded by public bodies, yet no dedicated national SG research programs (“programs”) currently exist. To explain why and understand how things might change in the future, we add concepts from role theory, a research tradition focused on international relations and foreign policy analysis, to the Multiple Streams Approach, a theoretical framework developed to study agenda setting at the national level, to assess policy processes related to SG research in four countries: Germany, China, Australia, and the United States (US). The results of our analysis indicate that, among these four states, only the US might plausibly consider initiating a program under present conditions. Germany, China, and Australia appear likely to seriously consider comparable efforts only in response to a US program, although their reasons for doing so and specific program designs would differ. The source of this variation, we argue, is the different foreign policy paradigms—or “national role conceptions”—prevailing in each state, which mediate between domestic and international politics and help define which policy proposals qualify as viable in different countries. From a policy perspective, this suggests that the global trajectory of SG depends disproportionately on developments in the US.