Professor Ben Cashore Bath Visit
SGAIN was delighted to support Professor Ben Cashore’s Global Chair Public Lecture, “Climate Policy Thermostats: The Planet’s Last Hope?”, held on Thursday, 14 May 2026. Hosted by Prof. Yixian Sun and co-hosted by the Institute for Sustainability and Climate Change and the Department of Social & Policy Sciences, the event explored why decades of climate policy experimentation have not yet delivered the scale of action required to avoid catastrophic warming.
Professor Cashore introduced the idea of “thermostatic institutions”: policy systems capable of maintaining long-term objectives by automatically adjusting as conditions change. Drawing on examples from non-climate domains, he argued that climate change should be treated as a “prioritisation” problem, requiring stronger authority, clearer objectives and more interdisciplinary policy design. The lecture opened up important questions around governance capacity, compliance, policy learning and the institutional innovations needed to keep the 1.5/2°C goal within reach.
