Conrad Buffier, Llewelyn Hughes, Frank Jotzo. 2025. Climate Policy Upscaling: Identifying and Overcoming Barriers to Climate Policy Stringency. Climate Policy.

Countries must increase the stringency of their domestic climate change mitigation policies if they are to meet their national emission reduction targets. However, governments face many barriers to enhancing the stringency of their climate policies. This paper examines Australia’s upscaling of its primary industrial sector mitigation policy – the Safeguard Mechanism – to understand how barriers to stringency were overcome. TOur findings suggest that higher levels of climate policy stringency can be supported through early policy design choices and a phased implementation approach that weaken barriers arising from the discourse around a policy, legislative hurdles, the time required to deliver policy change, institutional capacity and business resistance. These insights contribute to the growing literature on incremental barrier weakening that can be harnessed to deliver step changes in climate policy stringency.

Llewelyn Hughes. 2025. “Q&A with Llewelyn Hughes: Interdependence and the Low Carbon Energy Transition”. Nature Energy. 23 April.

How interdependencies are changing through the low-carbon energy transition has large implications for energy security, economic growth, and geopolitics. Early model intercomparisons suggested trade in fossil fuels will fall in volumetric terms as low-carbon technologies are deployed in increasing capacities. However, we are seeing that the energy transition is creating new interdependencies and leading to more complex trade and investment structures in the energy sector.

Lee White, Llewelyn Hughes, Michelle Lyons, Yuan Peng. 2021. Iterating Localization Policies in Support of Energy Transition: The Case of the Australian Capital Territory. Energy Policy. Vol. 158, 112568.

Policies promoting the localisation of economic benefits are commonly deployed in support of energy transitions. However, localisation policies can face challenges in ensuring alignment with energy transition goals while adapting to changes in the technological and market environment. We use the Australian Capital Territory’s localisation policy, tied to a reverse auction feed-in tariff, as an exploratory case to examine a localisation policy that underwent repeated updates to adapt to changed conditions. We find the inclusion of a review requirement can support localisation policies remaining congruent with energy transition goals throughout updates. In doing so, we contribute to understanding of how energy transition policies can be deliberatively designed to accelerate the deployment of low carbon technologies.

Andreas Goldthau and Llewelyn Hughes. 2020. Comment: Protect Global Supply Chains for Low Carbon Technologies. Nature, 3 September 2020.

Governments need to support global supply chains in the low-carbon technology sector. They must adopt a ‘do no harm’ principle. That means avoiding or rescinding policies such as tariffs or other barriers to imports. Lowering costs must be the main focus. Green industrial strategies should promote technological research and development, and create demand in promising areas and competitive niches, to boost jobs and business opportunities at home.

Annika Bose-Styczynski and Llewelyn Hughes. 2019. Public Policy Strategies for Next-generation Vehicle Technologies: An Overview of Leading Markets. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions Vol. 31, 262-272.

Governments apply a range of policy instruments to promote the electrification of personal transport using technologies such as Plug-in Hybrid, Battery Electric, and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles. We introduce a framework for comparing public policies cross-nationally used to support the research, development, and deployment of electric vehicles. We use this framework to identify whether governments are using similar policy instruments to promote vehicle electrification in the period 2006-2016. We also examine the extent to which policy instruments are neutral across technologies, presenting country case studies for China, the United States, Japan, and, within the regulatory framework of the European Union, Germany, and France. We find that governments have largely adopted technology neutral policies and are employing similar policy mixes in promoting vehicle electrification, despite differences in governing institutions between the countries examined. We conclude by suggesting a future research agenda, including identifying plausible explanations for this outcome.

Jonas Meckling and Llewelyn Hughes. 2018. Global Interdependence in Clean Energy Transitions. Business & Politics, Vol. 20, No. 4, 467-491.

The global energy industry is transforming as governments invest in clean energy technologies to address climate change, enhance energy security, and strengthen national competitiveness. Comparative research on clean energy transitions highlights the domestic drivers and constraints of clean energy transitions. This article contends that we need to understand the effects of global interdependence on clean energy transitions. Shifts in forms of interdependence between firms—influenced by the rise of global supply chains—have new implications for policy choices made by governments. Governments face more complex demands from domestic industries facing global economic competition, and act strategically in response to the actions of other governments, including sub-national actors, and firms in the global economy. We suggest that research on interdependence in clean energy transitions benefits from an analytical focus on mechanisms of transnational change such as cross-national and multi-level policy feedback and cross-national policy sequencing. Global interdependence has important implications for economic and environmental outcomes, affecting the durability of competitive advantage, and influencing the pace of the diffusion of clean energy technologies.