Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Climate change adversely affects the health quality of the young and creates fiercer storms. Ultimately reversing these detrimental effects requires governments worldwide to adopt more environmentally friendly socio-economic national policies. Towards these ends, Singapore and Australia provide useful insights. Both countries enjoy considerable policy successes in their Government-Industry-Academia climate change policy governance infrastructures, but face significant challenges in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. These compelling observations, given that climate change is often driven collectively by environmentally harmful land, air and water human activities, warrant deeper interrogations into the success factors informing successful climate change policies and risk factors informing under-performing climate change policies in Singapore's and Australia's land, water and air sectors from 2000 to 2019, respectively. Yet, research on such interrogations, is currently lacking. Acknowledging this, the Triple Helix (i.e. university-industry-government) innovation policy model (Ranga & Etzkowitz, 2013) and Yin (2014)'s case study approach serve as the conceptual and methodological frameworks respectively to analyze successful and under-performing climate change policies in Singapore's and Australia's land, air and water sectors from 2000 to 2019 (n=30), more deeply. Findings reveal that notable success factors are sustained government-industry-academia joint commitment and systemic effort to fight climate change; firmly established societal norm of the urgent need to address climate change. Notable risk factors involve insufficient motivations of governments, public and industry to prioritize environmentally sustainable economic development over environmentally unsustainable economic development; inadequate technical climate change expertise in government and industry. Finally, implications for future climate change research and policy are discussed.