Associate Professor Kate Owens is asking a deceptively simple question about the climate transition: how do we build institutions that can learn and act fast enough under conditions of uncertainty, while keeping the public good at the centre of the choices they make?
Climate targets are becoming more ambitious. New technologies are emerging at unprecedented speed. Funding commitments continue to grow.
Yet emissions remain high, communities are increasingly exposed to climate risks, and many promising solutions struggle to move from policy announcements to practical results.
For Associate Professor Kate Owens, Director of the Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law at Sydney Law School, this gap between ambition and action is where the climate challenge will be won or lost.
"We already know a great deal about what needs to change," she says. "The challenge is how to bring that change through institutions designed for a different economy, a different energy system and a much slower pace of reform."
Owens' research examines the law and institutions of the climate transition: how governments, industry and communities can act under uncertainty, learn as conditions change and ensure the transition serves the public good.
The challenge is how to bring that change through institutions designed for a different economy, a different energy system and a much slower pace of reform.
Director, Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law
Owens draws on a phrase recently used by historian Yuval Noah Harari: institutions need “eyes before teeth”.
The point is not simply that governments need better enforcement. Before regulation can bite, institutions need to be able to see what is changing.
“In the climate transition, you often do not know the complete answer at the outset,” Owens says. “Institutions need enough authority, expertise and funding to observe what is happening, bring different forms of knowledge together, test possible responses and change course as they learn.”
That changes how we think about implementation. Writing a new rule may be the end of a process, not the beginning.
When millions of Australian households installed rooftop solar and batteries, for example, the electricity system encountered questions it had not been designed to answer. How should privately owned energy resources interact with the grid? Who should have access? How should costs be shared? What protections should consumers have?
No single regulator or technical solution could settle those questions. Publicly supported forums brought regulators, networks, consumer representatives and technical experts together to test ideas before some of those ideas moved into formal rules, standards and practice.
“Announcing a stronger target doesn’t resolve these problems,” Owens says. “Governments still have to go back to the rules, funding arrangements and public bodies through which change will actually happen.”
Associate Professor Kate Owens is the Director of the Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law
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LinkScientific evidence can identify climate risks and test possible responses. But a response can be technically effective and still raise difficult questions about government power, existing rights and responsibility for its effects. Those questions are worked out through law, not answered by science.
That distinction is especially important where state processes intersect with Indigenous law. Treating Indigenous knowledge as evidence is not the same as recognising Indigenous law as a source of authority.
“The question is not simply whose information is considered,” Owens says. “It is also whose authority is recognised and who gets to shape the decision itself.”
Institutions need enough authority, expertise and funding to observe what is happening, bring different forms of knowledge together, test possible responses and change course as they learn
Director, Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law
These questions about authority and institutional capacity also run through Owens’ work on public investment and climate finance. Funding arrangements shape decision-making and affect what capacity institutions and communities have for the next challenge.
Governments are increasingly using public capital to support technologies and infrastructure before private investors are willing to carry all the risk. Institutions such as the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation shape the transition through the choices they make about risk and investment. Public funding can also leave behind knowledge and capability that extends beyond an individual project.
“Public investment should not simply get a project over the line,” Owens says. “It can build knowledge, skills and institutional capability that make the next decision easier.”
The same question arises in a different form in Pacific climate finance. Funding may exist and communities may have clear priorities, yet projects often pass through international institutions and outside advisers before reaching those expected to deliver them.
“Customary authority and community priorities can end up being treated as information to be fitted into a project designed elsewhere,” Owens says. “The challenge is to design climate finance systems that keep more decision-making, knowledge and capability where the project is actually being carried out.”
Both examples show that funding can strengthen the institutions and communities doing the work, or leave them dependent on expertise and decisions elsewhere.
Climate change is also forcing us to reconsider institutions developed under very different environmental conditions.
Owens’ work on the Murray–Darling Basin examines how water law can respond as assumptions about rainfall, river flows and future availability become increasingly unreliable.
Science can tell water managers what is likely to happen, but it cannot decide how less water should be shared between communities, agriculture, Indigenous Peoples and the environment. Those choices involve competing values and interests as well as changing hydrology.
Owens’ research asks how law can create opportunities to revisit these decisions as conditions change, bringing scientific, community and local knowledge into the process and making trade-offs more visible.
Her work on irrigation efficiency reveals a related problem: a technology intended to save water can increase consumption if the surrounding legal and governance settings are wrong.
“The larger ambition is a faster and more just transition that strengthens our capacity to shape change, rather than simply cope with its consequences,” Owens says.
Through the Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law, Owens brings governments, industry and communities together to examine the legal and institutional choices emerging through the climate transition.
One measure of success is whether an intervention leaves institutions better able to deal with the next problem. To revisit the rooftop solar example, experimentation gave regulators and networks practical experience that later fed into formal rules and decisions. Owens is interested in how climate policy can build that kind of capability over time.
The transition will always involve difficult choices over risk, public money and whose interests are protected. Owens’ research asks whether our institutions are equipped to make those choices well.
Law does more than govern a transition already under way. It helps shape which futures become possible – and whether governments, industry and communities have the capacity to steer change in the public interest.
As climate risks intensify, the challenge is no longer simply developing solutions, but ensuring laws, institutions and funding systems can put them into practice effectively and fairly.
At the University of Sydney, Associate Professor Kate Owens researches how law can help governments, industry and communities act under uncertainty, learn as conditions change and ensure the benefits of the climate transition serve the public good. Her work spans climate finance, public investment, energy transition, water management and environmental protection across Australia and the Asia-Pacific.
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